Laboratories of Friendship, Part 1: New Decolonial Culture Buildings Beyond the Russian Neo-Empire

Introduction

Over the past year, a plethora of new institutions of contemporary culture have opened, almost simultaneously, across territories situated on the edges of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Bloc: the Dnipro Centre of Contemporary Culture (in stages, 2021–25); the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2024); the Tashkent Centre of Contemporary Culture (2025); the Bukhara Biennial (2025); the Almaty Museum of Arts (2025); the Tselinny Center of Contemporary of Culture (2025), and more.1 

Many of these institutions are radical in their ambitions and consciously decolonial in their politics—both in relation to the history of Russian and Soviet domination, and to ongoing Russian imperialism. But what else do these buildings (and institutions) have in common? Is it merely a coincidence that so many of them have opened in the same historical moment? In full awareness that it does not do justice to their diverse and distinct geneses and missions, we might refer to each of these institutions as new decolonial culture buildings (NDCBs). While each NDCB embodies dimensions of decoloniality in its built (or reconstructed) form, each also has a nuanced, complex relationship to the heritage—and looming presence—of foreign (i.e. Russian) domination. 

Writing about new contemporary art museums in the early 2000s in Eastern Europe, the late Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski charted a dialectic between two directions being taken in relation to the wounds of history: traumaphilia and traumaphobia. Traumaphobic institutions, for Piotrowski, seek to ignore the wounds of the past, present, and future, finding flight in a depoliticized, superficially “global,” prestige-oriented approach to contemporary art.2 Traumaphilic institutions, by contrast, elevate trauma to the role of a key animus of missions and programs, in the process “overworking” (Piotrowski’s quasi-Freudian neologism) it to the point of fetishization, caricature, or even romanticization.3

In practice, institutions swing back and forth between different approaches to trauma, and none can be reduced neatly to one or the other. Piotrowski also signals a third way, “neither traumaphobic nor traumaphilic,” which he identifies with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the example he knew best, and which, his essay implies, is the healthiest. As opposed to the faux globality of traumaphobia and the solipsistic parochialism of traumaphilia, Piotrowski advocates an institutional politics which is planetary in outlook, but also rooted in place, deriving its globality from the “specificity of the collective memory” pertinent to the locality in which it functions.4 For Piotrowski—who subsequently developed the notion of the “critical” museum with art historian Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius—criticality stems from a willingness and capacity to confront the “specificity” (including the site-specificity) of trauma.5  

Elaborating on Piotrowski and Murawska-Muthesius, I argue that a generative approach to trauma, critique, and institutions ought to be not only critical but also radical. Insofar as the Latin word for root is radix, a radical institutional politics ought to stem from an engagement with locality and its most urgent contradictions, traumas, and modes of resistance, but it need not be blind to distant horizons. A radical institution is one that engages, builds alliances and friendships, and campaigns or co-conspires with other places with which it finds common ground, and with whose wounds, modes of healing, and forms of resistance it identifies with and supports.6 

The limitation of Piotrowski’s analysis is that it considers trauma in the psychoanalytic-mnemonic sense, as a wound suffered in the past which may have been repressed, but which nevertheless exerts some kind of complex impact on the present. Similarly, postcolonial scholarship (as the prefix implies) is wont to treat empire (and war, genocide, and the multiple forms of violence they carry in their wake) as something which has passed, but of which traces remain: imperial debris, legacies, afterlives, fragments. Trauma, however, is a not a thing that has taken place. Wounds are still being inflicted. Empires continue to exist, and indeed to re-form in the neoliberal-authoritarian revanchist guise of recolonizing neo-empires, which Putinism and Trumpism are in the process of consolidating, legitimizing, and normalizing. Neo-empire is not about debris, traces, or other quasi-psychoanalytic metaphorical formulations. It mass-produces rubble, ruin, shrapnel, and death; it mass-inflicts physical and psychical wounds upon civilians and defenders, and in its unhinged refusal to stop, or be held accountable, it threatens to continue churning out trauma without end.7 

In each of the NDCBs explored here, the traumatic legacy of Tsarist and Soviet imperialism, and the violent effusion of ongoing Russian neo-imperialism, takes on multiple, disparate forms. One common form, however, is embodied in the figure of the “Friend” (with a capital “F”). 

Coined in the Stalinist 1930s as the core concept of Soviet nationalities policy, the notion of “Friendship of the Peoples” (Druzhba Narodov) signaled the death of socialist internationalism, and its replacement with a Russocentric, ersatz multinationalism in which all Friends were demarcated and separated (each Soviet citizen had their “nationality” marked in their Soviet passport), and one Friend (the Russian Friend) was the most equal of all. All other Friends were ranked in a racialized hierarchy and subject to famine, targeted persecution and killing, deportation and exile, environmental degradation, labor exploitation and resource extractivism, as well as varying forms of cultural reification, exoticization, and infantilization. 

In many places in the former Soviet sphere of domination, then, the notion of “Friendship” immediately triggers connotations of Russian imperialism, and of warmongering masquerading as internationalist solidarity. Though its lineage is high-Stalinist, Druzhba (Friendship) was not extinguished in the wake of the de-Stalinizing thaw. It lived on—in ossified, zombified form—throughout the late-Soviet and post-Soviet decades. Today, the Russian Federation continues to deploy the notion of Friendship to camouflage or prettify ethnocidal acculturation at home, and extractivist influence-peddling and neo-imperial wars of domination abroad. At the edges of the former Soviet Bloc, Friendship itself is the trauma. 

Over the course of a month in the late summer of 2025, I traveled to five NDCBs positioned in the just-beyond of the Russian neo-empire, in Dnipro, Tashkent, Bukhara, and Almaty. With each visit, I tried to assess how their institutional formations attempt to navigate their (capital “F”) Friendship-traumas, and the extent to which, in the process of working through Friendship’s wounds, they do (or don’t) give rise to novel, radical, rooted, decolonial ideas, images, affects, politics, and (small “f”) practices of friendship. These forms of philia or affinity reject submission to Soviet nostalgia or to the ideology of the Russian neo-empire, and at the same time hint towards alternatives to the depoliticized, escapist recipe-book of globalized artworld subjectivity.8

My journey started in Dnipro, whose geopolitical predicament is the most precarious among those encountered, and whose institutional politics the most radical. But I begin by rooting this survey in the context of Warsaw: the site with which I am most familiar, and whose armless, nomadic, long-hidden Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship (1954) first engendered my fascination with the perils (and potentialities) of strange formations of politicized philia.

“That Byzantium in some of our heads.” Still from a 2021 video tour of the construction of the Museum, contrasting its simple facade with that of the Palace’s. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Amputated Friendship

Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, or MSN) was founded in 2005, and has been gradually building its collection and public profile over time.9 During its two decades of gestation, the museum has grappled with the challenge of creating the first building to be erected in the immediate vicinity of the Palace of Culture and Science—a violently phallic Stalinist skyscraper completed in 1955—since the fall of the Polish People’s Republic in 1989. The MSN building, designed by American neo-modernist Thomas Phifer, and incorporating some aspects of the unbuilt competition-winning design developed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, is a stark, horizontal, sparkling white concrete edifice: a dramatic contrast to the vertical, monumental, elaborately-gargoyled Palace of Culture.

The museum’s architecture seeks to embody a dialogical counterpoint to the Palace of Culture’s aggressive, monophonic, totalitarian geometry and morphology. At the same time, the construction of the Museum—which many in Warsaw thought, for many decades, to be an impossible feat—constitutes a symbolic victory over the “chaos” of Warsaw’s post-socialist decades. During that period, ownership of land plots was long disputed between state bodies, public institutions, private owners, and the (claimed or actual) descendants of pre-war landlords, whose property was expropriated by Poland’s state socialist regime after 1945. 

Artur Żmijewski, The Battle of KDT, 2009. Film still. Courtesy of Artur Żmijewski.

For a long time, the museum’s construction was blocked by property claimants, as well as by market traders who worked in a ramshackle trading hall erected on the site in the 1990s. In order to allow for the construction to begin (and for the completion of a key interchange station of Warsaw’s metro system, which also runs through the site) the traders had to be evicted. They refused to go, and had to be forced out by horse-mounted riot police armed with tear gas and water cannons. What came to be known as the “Battle of Parade Square” constitutes a symbolic expression of the fact that the trauma and violence underlying the founding of an arts museum in a post-socialist, neoliberal context is not only the ghost of communism past, but also the violence of capitalism present.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Friendship in the Palace, 1956. © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos / Forum.

At the center of the museum’s collection, as well as its institutional ideology, is Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship, a socialist realist sculpture by Polish-Jewish artist Alina Szapocznikow, who, after her emigration to France in the late 1950s, became one of the leading figures of Poland’s neo-avant-garde in exile. Szapocznikow’s sculpture, depicting two muscular male figures wrapped in fraternal embrace, stood in the lobby of the Palace of Culture from 1955 until 1992. In the profit-seeking, iconoclastic atmosphere of the early 1990s, it was sold off for the price of scrap metal by the Palace’s then-director. Friendship was too big to fit through the Palace’s front door, so the worker’s arms and the banner they held were hacked off in order to get it out of the building. It remained, for many years, in the suburban smallholding of the tradesperson who executed its removal from the Palace.

Friendship in the private yard of its then-owner, Warsaw suburbs, January 1998. Photo: Krzysztof Pijarski.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, despite the efforts of journalists to draw attention to its fate, Poland’s museums and culture institutions remained indifferent to the sculpture, treating it as a piece of totalitarian kitsch not worthy of their attention. By the time institutions did become interested, in the late 2000s, Friendship’s owner realized its rising value and held on to it, anticipating its capacity to turn a profit. His instincts were correct: in 2019, Friendship was put on auction and bought by a wealthy businessman and arts patron for around 2 million PLN (approximately 500,000 EUR). Friendship’s new owner proceeded to gift (in fact to loan in perpetuity) the statue to the MSN, which designated it to occupy a central spot in the new building, then under construction. 

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the museum’s curatorial team questioned whether it would be appropriate to display such a monument to Soviet and Russian militarist imperialism at the heart of an institution in the center of a city that is home to a population of tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians. Ultimately, however, the statue—contextualized by other artworks placed in its vicinity—was placed on a nodal spot in the building, adjacent to the building’s monumental central staircase. It currently sits on a first-floor landing, facing a window, from which the two amputated totalitarian Friends have a direct view of the Palace, their former home. 

Friendship in MSN, November 2024. Photo: Maja Wirkus.

In the monumental staircase of the MSN, the cycle of expropriation and appropriation, violence and healing, amputation and sublimation, comes full-circle, mediated by an act of philanthropy and gifting—this time, the giver is not a communist dictator who stamps his name all over his benevolence, but a businessman, who, although his name is known, largely avoids publicity. The museum lobby mimics and taunts the palace lobby. Friendship remains amputated, but through this very amputation, through the retention of the visibility of its wound, the foregrounding of the trauma, its presence becomes tolerable, even generative. 

Monastyrsky Island, Dnipro, August 2025. All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted.

This Fucking Empire

The city of Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine is named after the river whose banks it straddles, and whose flow its central avenues follow. Dnipro was known in Tsarist times as Yekaterinoslav, in honor of Catherine the Great, who in 1787 re-founded the old Ukrainian Zaporizhzhian Cossack fortress town of Kodak on lands conquered at the end of the eighteenth century from the Cossack Sich and the Ottoman Empire as the capital of the imperial province of “Novorossiya” (New Russia). During Soviet years, the city, which was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926, became an industrial powerhouse and one of the centers of the Soviet missile and rocket-building industry. As such, it spent several decades as a closed city, inaccessible to foreign visitors without a special permit. The veil of secrecy was only lifted in the 1980s during perestroika. In the 1990s, Dnipro emerged as the crucible of Ukrainian oligarchic capitalism, with postwar Ukraine’s kingpin political and business clans hailing from tight-knit networks in the former closed city. 

Today, Dnipro is situated 100 kilometers from the (gradually, but steadily) shifting frontline of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It is the closest “safe” city to the Donetsk region and, since 2014, has played host to a large community of people displaced from territories occupied by Russia, among them many culture workers, artists, musicians, and scholars, as well as entire institutions. It is in this context—of the country-wide social and cultural upheaval that followed the Maidan Uprising and geographic proximity to a decade-long war—that the NGO Kultura Medialna (KM) emerged in Dnipro in 2013. KM was founded by a group of local activists and curators—Andrii Palash, Kateryna Rusetska and Yuliia Ovcherenko—with the goal of energizing experimental art and culture in their city, and making new use of its neglected and under-appreciated built heritage, which includes grand nineteenth-century industrial structures, spectacular expressionist theaters, constructivist palaces of culture, and a profusion of late Soviet modernist leisure and culture buildings.

The constructivist Ilyich Palace of Culture, Dnipro, completed in 1932; a venue for several iterations of the Construction Festival. Photo: Yuliia Krivich.

After years of organized the roving Construction Festival of contemporary culture at various (mostly abandoned, mostly Soviet-era modernist) locations around the city, in 2019, Kultura Medialna moved into a building and acquired concrete institutional form in the guise of the Dnipro Center of Contemporary Culture (DCCC). On the surface, KM’s new home, situated in the historical core of the city, appears entirely at odds with the organization’s grassroots, contrarian spirit and aesthetic predilections. The palatial nineteenth-century edifice—complete with a double-flighted imperial staircase, grand ballroom, and bearded Atlases supporting the ceilings on the piano nobile—served in turn as a private residence (1852–63); the residence of the Russian imperial governor of Yekaterinoslav province (1863–74); the headquarters of the Territorial Council (Zemska Uprava) (1874–1917); and, finally, from the 1920s until 1991, the General Staff (Genshtab) of the Soviet Red Army for Dnipropetrovsk. The oldest part of the complex was built according to a design by the leading Saint Petersburg academician Aleksandr Thon (brother of Konstantin Thon, architect of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour). The so-called New Building, the most opulent section of the complex, was completed in 1900 in a matching neo-classical style. The two structures are connected by a corner infill, the Secretariat, finished in 1904 in art-nouveau garb. 

Andrii Palash at DCCC, July 2023.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the Genshtab HQ was sold off by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and changed hands while remaining derelict over the course of the 1990s and 2000s. It was eventually purchased by a charity foundation established by a group of wealthy Dnipro businesspeople, the Center of Jewish Education (CJE). The old Dnipro Genshtab was first earmarked as the location for a new private Jewish girls’ school. Eventually, however, the CJE decided to give the building over for cultural purposes. They came to an agreement with Kultura Medialna, which was lobbying ferociously for a permanent base at the time: CJE would let KM use the building rent-free and pay for its renovation. They would not, however, provide funds to support DCCC’s program, an endowment, or team salaries. The downside of this arrangement is permanent precarity; the upside is that DCCC retains full control over its cultural offering. 

Tamara Turliun and Andriy Lyashchuk, In search of light. Installation view in “Nevertheless,” curated by Clemens Poole and Kateryna Rusetska, Construction Festival, DCCC, November 2023. Photo: Yunona Prud.

DCCC’s renovation was carried out by a local group of architects and designers led by Anastasia Timchenko and Nikita Momot, following the principle Andrii Palash calls “non-interference.” The Secretariat, which now houses the Artsvit Gallery on the ground floor and DCCC’s exhibition spaces on the upper floor, has been connected to the Old Building, which is home to offices, recording studios, and meeting facilities for the (inter-connected) clusters of friends who coinhabit the building. The rooms are semi-open plan, separated from each other through elegant metal-framed glazed partitions. As attractive, transparent, and collectivity-coalescing as these spaces are, in the context of a city suffering from almost daily UAV and ballistic missile attacks, the sheer quantity of glass generates discomfort. “If a drone flew through our window or roof, all of these multiple layers of glass would shatter into fast-flying death shards,” Rusetska tells me. “These spaces might be great in London,” she adds, “but what we need in Dnipro are thick reinforced concrete walls and bomb shelters.” 

A team of historical conservators worked alongside the architects under the direction of brothers Danylo and Anton Gurin. Period features—plaster moldings, porticoes, marble sculptures, iron banisters—were carefully preserved throughout the building. The complex’s listed building status necessitated that certain features, such as the facade’s white color scheme, be stripped of patina and restored to their (alleged) period appearance. However, layers of palimpsestic alteration have been accentuated wherever possible. Some brick walls are left exposed, while others are covered in a rough layer of plaster. Scars cut through the plaster, revealing the rustic wooden lath, straw, and mud construction holding up the interior walls separating the grand ballroom from the imperial staircase.  

DCCC, July 2023.

Restoration work on DCCC’s interiors was never finished. As they put finishing touches to it in the first months of 2022, both of the Gurin brothers volunteered, together with their father, to join the Ukrainian armed forces. Anton, the younger brother, has been missing in action since Summer 2025. 

DCCC’s interior courtyard was, until recently, a dejected military parking lot of rusty garages and patched-up cement. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the DCCC team began offering the space to volunteer and humanitarian organizations who needed a place to park their vehicles and store their goods. In the summer of 2024, the courtyard was finally cleared and landscape designer Denys Meshcheriakov set to work planting it with drought-resistant herbaceous plants and grasses. Most of the plants and grasses, Meshcheriakov says, are endemic to southern Ukraine (the Dnipro basin and Azov coastal regions), and he foraged many himself. For 2026, Meshcheriakov says, “I planted a lot of roses from the butterfly group and from the floribunda group. This is such a garden—an experiment and a space to breathe.” 

According to the co-founders of Kultura Medialna, their NGO started with three friends “sitting on a bench” and dreaming nebulously of the future.10 Quite quickly, those dreams came to pass, but their implementation became incremental, and ultimately altered radically by the full-scale invasion. The structure of friendship that underlay DCCC’s operations was at once consolidated and sorely tested by the traumatic conjuncture of war, displacement, resistance, and sacrifice. Nevertheless, the group of friends—which shifts and morphs, taking in and giving up members through osmosis—has been hardened and tested by DCCC’s determination to hold onto its horizontal operating model—notwithstanding the vertical relationships of dependency that connect them to the building’s owners, and the palatial, yet still-unfinished environment in which they work, not to mention the intensifying, ever-nearing presence of war. 

I ask Rusetska and Palash whether they experience the presence of Russian imperialism and Soviet militarism in the DCCC building as something tangible. “100 percent we do; in a sense our entire program constitutes a reflection on this imperial legacy,” Rusetska says. Indeed, making sense of Dnipro as a locality, and its complex and intertwined histories and presents, is the core mission of several among KM’s ongoing initiatives. But Rusetska adds that DCCC is not merely concerned with imperial “legacies.” “The front is now only 100 kilometers away. So this fucking empire is still moving towards us from every side, and so it doesn’t exactly allow you to relax and analyze its complex materiality, or whatever.” 

DCCC’s field of vision is not confined to Dnipro as a locality; it regularly works with international curators and artists, including from places often seen as positioned on opposing sides of Ukraine’s geopolitical faultlines. The 2024 exhibition, “Who Holds That Field Dear?,” co-curated by Diana Khalilova, Cicely Farrer, Kateryna Rusteska, and Laura Mansfield, for instance, examined the intersection of grain, hunger, colonialism, and war, bringing together artists and researchers from Ukraine, Lebanon (Dia Mrad, Nour Ouayda), Palestine (Samaa Emad), and Tajikistan/Kazakhstan (Nazira Karimi). 

"Frenemies: Data," a discussion panel at the Construction Festival, August 2025. The panel featured Ukrainian artists and researchers Oleksii Minko and Fantastic Little Splash (Lera Malchenko and Sasha Hants), Lebanese-Polish-British anthropologist Stefan Tarnowski, French-Korean researcher and journalist Paul Dza, and Kateryna Rusetska. DCCC team member Oleksiy Drubich is also in the photograph.

DCCC began and continues, first of all, as a structure of friendship, but friendship is a complex formation, never free of dependencies, interferences, and threats. The limits, ambivalences, and undersides of F/friendship became an explicit source of reflection for the organization in the context of “Routine Flux,” the ninth edition of the Construction Festival, held at the end of August 2025—the date of my most recent visit to the city. This exploration of F/friendship was expressed, in particular, through the name of the festival’s discussion program (which I co-organized), held under the title of Frenemies. In the words of Rusetska, this hybrid English term “perfectly expresses what we are going through—this controversial and dangerous line between friendship and hostility.” In a Ukraine already four years into its full-scale resistance to Russia’s war, and twelve years from the war’s start, the ability to draw the line between friend and enemy (not to speak of the distinction between friend and Friend) is not a matter of intellectual curiosity or aesthetic reflection, but of survival. Funding has been cut by (some) international bodies who have lost interest in Ukraine; worldwide audiences and onetime allies drift into a mix of indifference, ennui, and occasional hostility. But networks, and the ties that bind them, remain in place, scattered and scarred as they are around the world by violent death, injury, exile, and a chronic lack of stability and resources.

Every time I have visited DCCC, air alarms have gone off. During one panel as part of the Frenemies program, explosions were heard outside and air alert apps warned that drones and ballistics were incoming. The DCCC team suspended the discussion, which was being held in the ballroom (known as the Blue Room after the color scheme it had prior to renovation) with its large, and therefore most perilous, arched windows. As we relocated to the courtyard to sit out the air alarm, a friend who had gone out for a cigarette just before told us that one of the explosions we heard was a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile intercepting a Russian Shahed UAV a mere couple hundred meters overhead. The all-clear came and we headed back to the Blue Room to continue our discussion. 

Due to ongoing Russian attacks against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, electricity has turned into a rare luxury. The power and heating in DCCC are turned off for at least sixteen hours a day. The remainder of the time, the team works without grid electricity, only generating a minimal power supply necessary for their most basic tasks—charging phones and computers, powering video monitors for the exhibition—from diesel generators and Ecoflow solar power stations. 

The day before I finished writing this text, I found out that V, a friend serving in the armed forces, had been severely wounded on the Zaporizhzhia front. A salvo of KAB laser-guided bombs hit a building he was walking towards while carrying a bag of groceries. He was dug out from the rubble by his comrades, but one leg had to be amputated below the knee. After a night spent in intensive care at a hospital in Zaporizhzhia, V was taken to the Mechnykov hospital in Dnipro, the city’s biggest. It is Ukraine’s busiest “major trauma” hospital—trauma here meaning any physical injury that has the capacity to cause serious lifelong injury or death. My friend’s phone was smashed up in the attack and his family could not reliably reach him. Thanks to the help of the DCCC team, I was able to buy a phone in the city, and arrange for it to be taken to V. In the preceding days, however, Dnipro had been hit by a succession of Russian missile and drone attacks, and the city’s power grid was completely knocked out of service. One million people languished, in the sub-zero temperatures, without electricity, light, hot water, or central heating, seventeen to twenty hours a day, for several weeks. Notwithstanding, Olena Misiura from the DCCC team volunteered to pick the phone up from the store, take it to DCCC to charge it on the center’s Ecoflow, deliver it in person to the hospital, find V amidst the chaos and tension of the emergency wards, and hand it to him with a smile (together with a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a bag of bananas).

In Dnipro, trauma is not a metaphor. Empire is not a legacy. Its debris spans centuries, but it produces fresh rubble and new wounds every day. Friendship and solidarity are neither metaphors nor monuments nor horizons. They are material and social facts, rooted indelibly in the imperative of survival. Today—four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—the enemy is not quite at the gates; it is two fiber-optic FPV-drone ranges away, slouching gradually closer. Yet DCCC—rooted in radical forms of friendship, hospitality, and solidarity, engaged continuously in the struggle for survival and resistance, but alert to and cognizant of the struggles of others—holds ground.